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" An AI-generated band got 1m plays on Spotify. Now music insiders say listeners should be warned The Velvet Sundown released two albums before admitting their music, images and backstory were created by AI Lanre Bakare Arts and culture correspondent Mon 14 Jul 2025 07.00 BST Share They went viral, amassing more than 1m streams on Spotify in a matter of weeks, but it later emerged that hot new band the Velvet Sundown were AI-generated - right down to their music, promotional images and backstory. The episode has triggered a debate about authenticity, with music industry insiders saying streaming sites should be legally obliged to tag music created by AI-generated acts so consumers can make informed decisions about what they are listening to."

"Hayleigh Bosher, associate dean of intellectual property law at Brunel University, who researches the music industry, said "the law needs to move with the times" as "making music is so different to how it was 50 years ago". She added: If Sheeran loses, I imagine we will see even more cases. I don't think copyright is doing its job properly if songwriters are afraid, that's stifling creativity.""

""With streaming, things were starting to become quite throwaway and disposable," says Finlay Shakespeare. A Bristol-based musician and audio engineer, Shakespeare recently deleted his streaming accounts and bought a used iPod on eBay for £40. With streaming, he says: "If I didn't gel with an album or an artist's work at first, I tended not to go back to it." But he realised that a lot of his all-time favourite albums were ones that grew on him over time. "Streaming was actually contributing to some degree of dismissal of new music." Even with digital downloads, he tended to give music more time and attention."

"The music industry is urging streaming platforms not to let artificial intelligence use copyrighted songs for training, in the latest of a run of arguments over intellectual property that threaten to derail the generative AI sector's explosive growth. In a letter to streamers including Spotify and Apple music, the record label Universal music Group expressed fears that AI labs would scrape millions of tracks to use as training data for their models and copycat versions of pop stars."

"He's right to be annoyed - these tracks are a violation of an artist's creativity and personhood - and the fakes are noticeably more sophisticated than those from a few years ago, when Jay-Z was made to rap Shakespeare (this is the kind of humour beloved of AI dorks). The tech will continue to improve to the point where the differences become indistinguishable. Perhaps lazy artists will soon use AI to generate their latest album, not so much phoning it in as texting it. AI composes its music by regurgitating things it's been trained to listen to in vast song databases, and that's not so different than the way human-composed pop music is recombined from prior influences. Producers, engineers, lyricists and all the other people who work behind a star could be usurped or at least have their value driven down by cheap AI tools."

"One of the biggest cases of hypocrisy was uncovered last year with little more than a whisper. Most of us will remember seeing the "You wouldn't steal a car" piracy adverts on every dvd we played in the early 00s. What most people have yet to discover is that the music for the anti-piracy campaign was actually pirated from a Dutch musician named Melchior Reitveldt. In a move that would have marketing specialists turning in their graves, Reitveldt's music (which had been sanctioned for a local film festival's anti-piracy campaign) was used repeatedly for the standardised anti-piracy warning that appeared constantly. In a tale that became pointlessly complicated, Reitveldt dealt with corrupt royalty collectors such as Jochem Gerrits (who tried to gain profit for himself through the situation) before finally reaping his just rewards in 2012, 6 years after he originally composed the music."

"This study therefore concludes that file sharing has not reduced the creation of new original music. It may have led to fewer works as a result of fewer new artists entering the field, but it was also associated with an increase in output by those artists who chose, despite the lower returns, to devote their talents to making music. Given that file sharing undeniably promotes the broad dissemination of existing works, this conclusion suggests that file sharing is both fully consonant with copyright's constitutionally-delimited purposes and welfare enhancing."

Ways of knowing what peoples musical taste is through technology and analysis

"Ultimately, despite all the pitfalls of social media, there may be no going back. "Sometimes I wish the electrical grid would go down so I wouldn't have to do it any more," says Quin. "But we're in the maze and I don't know how to get out.""

"The noise got so loud it caught the ear of parliament: the digital, culture, media and sport select committee opened an inquiry into the fairness of the "streaming economy". "

"The lawsuit accused Anthropic of infringing the publishers' copyrights by copying their lyrics without permission as part of the "massive amounts of text" that it scrapes from the internet to train Claude to respond to human prompts. The publishers also say that Claude illegally reproduces the lyrics by request, and in response to "a whole range of prompts that do not seek Publishers' lyrics", including "requests to write a song about a certain topic, provide chord progressions for a given musical composition, or write poetry or short fiction in the style of a certain artist or songwriter"."

"And even without parental anxiety hemming them in: where are teens to go? In the last decade, YMCA data shows that more than 4,500 youth work jobs have been cut and 750 youth centres shut down. According to the Music Venue Trust, two grassroots Music venues are closing every week. The nightclub industry is in freefall. Teenagers can't hang around in parks without arousing the suspicion of overprotective adults who have decided these rare recreational spaces belong to their toddlers alone; city squares and skate parks and pedestrian zones that were once public are now being insidiously privatised, monitored via CCTV and policed by private security guards. No wonder then, that teens withdraw to online video game worlds, the last spaces they have left that remain unmediated by their parents or other authority figures - the last places where they are mostly beyond the reach of adult control."

"It's been a year since the music links on Myspace stopped working; at first the company insisted that they were working on it, but now they've admitted that all those files are lost: "As a result of a server migration project, any photos, videos, and audio files you uploaded more than three years ago may no longer be available on or from Myspace. We apologize for the inconvenience and suggest that you retain your back up copies."

"Sixty years after her death, Édith Piaf's voice will be re-created using AI to narrate her biopic. As reported by Variety, Warner Music Group (WMG) has partnered with the Piaf estate to produce the feature-length film Edith. Artificial intelligence has been trained to replicate Piaf's voice by feeding it hundreds of voice clips, with WMG promising the resultant re-creation will "further enhance the authenticity and emotional impact of her story"."

Geat article - very thought provoking...

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"Among six to seven year olds, who have grown up with YouTube, Spotify music streaming and the BBC iPlayer, the average DQ (digital quotient) score was 98, higher than for those aged between 45 and 49, who scored an average of 96. Digital understanding peaks between 14 and 15, with a DQ of 113 - and then drops gradually throughout adulthood, before falling rapidly in old age."